Presidential candidate Barack Obama won the Democratic primary last
time around largely on the strength of his extremely limited and
inconsistent opposition to the war on Iraq. Then he chose as his
running mate Senator Joe Biden, a man who had led efforts in the U.S.
Senate to support the invasion. Obama's staff told reporters that he
would be inclined to keep Robert Gates on as Secretary of War (or
"Defense") -- exactly the same plan proposed by Senator John McCain's
campaign. Obama said he'd like Colin Powell to be a part of his
administration, and repeatedly announced that his cabinet would include
Republicans. Obama had approached leading warmonger Congressman Rahm
Emanuel about becoming his chief of staff.

Obama's commitment to de-escalation in Iraq was questionable, and his
commitment to complete withdrawal nonexistent. He supported the idea of
launching attacks on Pakistan and Syria. He said he wanted more troops
in Afghanistan and wanted them there for a long, long time. Three times
in three debates McCain proposed cutting military spending and Obama
avoided the topic. Obama proposed significantly enlarging the largest
military the world had ever seen. Obama refused to forswear the use of
aggressive war or even first-strike nuclear attacks. He claimed that
Bush and Cheney had not committed any crimes that he was aware of.

Yet, Obama gave speech after speech promising that ending the war in
Iraq would be his first act in office: "I will promise you this, that if
we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the
first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end
to this war. You can take that to the bank." What candidate Obama
explained in corporate media interviews was a little different. He said
repeatedly that he would begin a withdrawal his first month in office,
pull out one to two brigades per month and be done in 16 months. That
did not happen.

On Afghanistan, Obama's withdrawal promises have been made and broken during his presidency.

Plenty of pre-election promises have been discarded as well.
Candidate Obama swore he would not rewrite laws with signing
statements. He promised huge advances in transparency and openness. He
promised support for whistleblowers. He would fix NAFTA, not duplicate
it in more countries. The Bush tax cuts would end. A President Obama
would not launch a war without Congress. Obama Version .08 was a
horrible, horrible candidate, and yet he made dozens of promises that
have been tossed aside, making him now even worse -- unless one chooses
to accept as credible the same promises again.

None of this is to suggest that the Republicans can't nominate
someone even worse than the actual Obama. Of course they can and will.
The point is to recognize that focusing activist energy on elections
should not come at the expense of the real work of building a movement
to change this country. Making the rational lesser-evil choice every
four years and failing to focus on real work for nonviolent radical
change consistently presents us four years later with two choices who
are both worse than last time. And those choices are, each time,
candidates for a more powerful, more tyrannical office.

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Obama has not just failed to "close Guantanamo," whether one means by
that the symbolism of moving one of our smaller lawless prisons to
Illinois or actually ending the practice of imprisoning people without
trail worldwide. Obama has formalized, codified, and normalized, the
presidential power to imprison, rendition, torture, murder, bomb, and
invade at will. Obama Version .12 will compete with the "racist
candidate" for those powers. I put "racist" in quotes, not because the
Republicans aren't racists (although even Romney's racism could be
phony), but because were it not for racism our nation would not be doing
the things it is currently doing to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya,
Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, etc., etc. Obama is about to promise us more
government activism. I can think of several countries that could do
with a bit less of his style of government activism. And one of them is
ours. Campaign promises don't touch every detail, but when Obama's
Department of Agriculture recently approved Monsanto GE corn with
Agent-Orange herbicide after receiving 45,000 negative comments and 23
positive, was that the change you could believe it? Obama is working
night and day to protect mega-banks from responsibility for mortgage
fraud. He will speak in his State of the Union about equality before
the law.

Obamapologists will tell you about good intentions and Republican
resistance in Congress, and yet Obama came in with a large Democratic
majority in both houses of Congress, and a Democratic leadership in the
Senate willing to circumvent the
filibuster-everything-60-vote-requirement when and only when it chose
to, and chose to do what Obama instructed. Obama met in secret with the
health insurance big whigs and insisted that the healthcare bill not
include even a token pretense of a movement away from their control.
Now who's getting "taken to the bank"?

By September 2009 it was clear enough, even pre-Peace Prize, where
President Obama was heading. I then wrote an article called "Bush's Third Term." It still accurately describes the state of the promise of Obama and of Obama's forgotten promises.

David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)